One motivation to maintain different MAPSETs is to store maps related to project issues or subregions. Another motivation is to support simultaneous access of several users to the map layers stored within the same LOCATION, i.e. teams working on the same project. For teams a centralized GRASS DATABASE would be defined in a network file system (e.g. NFS). Besides access to his/her own MAPSET, each user can also read map layers in other users' MAPSETs, but s/he can modify or remove only the map layers in his/her own MAPSET.You can learn more about mapsets and how to seamlessly access maps found in another MAPSET of the same LOCATION in the g.mapsets documentation.